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Who will be Chess World Champion 2013 – Visvanathan Anand or Magnus Carlsen?

During the next days, all eyes of the chess world will be on Chennai at the Bay of Bengal. In the city at the east coast of South India, the title defender Visvanathan Anand and the world’s number 1 Magnus Carlsen will fight for the World Championship title. Quite a few experts expect the Norwegian to dethrone the current title holder.

First duel of Anand and Carlsen on Saturday, November 9th 2013

After the official opening ceremony of the Chess World Championship 2013 took place yesterday, the first duel between Visvanathan Anand and Magnus Carlsen will be carried out tomorrow, on November 9th. In the first duel, challenger Carlsen will begin playing White. Overall, 12 duels are scheduled until November 26th. In case the two are equal in score at 6:6 points after the regular matches, a tie-break will decide the new Chess World Champion on November 28th. Theoretically speaking, the new World Champion could be already determined on November 18th, for which one of the two players must win at 6.5:0.5 points.

Rules and regulations of the Chess World Championship 2013

The championship is played with classical thinking time. The first 40 moves must be made within a time frame of 120 minutes, the following 20 in 60 minutes and 15 minutes remain for the rest of the duel, for which the 30 second rule applies after the 61st move. Whoever reaches a score of 6.5 points first, will be new Chess World Champion. If Anand and Carlsen are equal in points after twelve duels, colors will be drawn and reassigned and a tie-break of four duels in rapid chess (25 minutes + 10 seconds) will be played. If there is still no winner after the rapid chess duels, two blitz chess duels are to follow (5 minutes + 3 seconds). For the case, that still no winner is crowned, there will be sets of two blitz chess duels until a new title holder is determined – or until ten blitz matches have been played. After that, the final round will be a sudden-death-duel.

Visvanathan Anand World Champion since 2007

The Indian Visvanathan Anand has been World Champion since 2007, holds an Elo-rating of 2775 points and therefore ranks 8th in worldwide standings. The 22 year-old challenger Magnus Carlsen, on the other hand, is the number 1 in worldwide rankings with an Elo of 2870. Through the victory of the Candidates’ Tournament in London in March he qualified for the World Championship. In London, he scored 8.5 points, just like Vladimr Kramnik, but achieved more victories throughout the tournament than the Russian. Until now, Anand and Carlsen faced each other in 29 duels, of which 20 ended in draws. Anand was able to win 6 matches, while the Norwegian prevailed only 3 times over the Indian World Champion.